 I said I wanted to talk with you about two truly extraordinary men who now had the chance to discuss al-Mairaq, and now I have the wonderful pleasure of introducing you to Professor Charles Ogletree. I have to begin with an apology to Professor Ogletree. When I invited him here and we talked about bedridden, I said, you can leave cold, wet Cambridge and come to sunny Southern California, I said it took him two and a half hours just now to drive from Los Angeles to get here, and I think all of us feel collective guilt in Southern California for what you had to go through in the weather. Professor Ogletree is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He grew up in Resed, California. He went to Stanford for college, and then to Harvard Law School. After law school, he went to work as a public defender in the DC Public Defender Office, became a partner of a law firm in DC, and then became Professor of Law at Harvard. He's been the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law there since 1998. He's also the founder of the Charles Hamilton Houston Center at Harvard. When I think of who I would regard as a role model, Sal from my students, I can't think of anybody better than Professor Ogletree. He is a superb classroom teacher. He's an outstanding scholar, in fact I think we're going to be selling one of your books outside after the talk, and he's also very much a civil rights lawyer, a public interest lawyer, and an activist. I could spend all of the rest of the afternoon telling you about the cases and causes involved with. But if I would think of somebody who Almyroff would love to hear in Singapore, it's very much Professor Ogletree. So it's a great pleasure to introduce you to my law school classmate and dear friend, Charles Ogletree. Thanks so much, and I'm very happy to be here as late as I am. It was two and a half hours. I've heard about the 405 parking lot. Now I know what you mean by the parking lot. It was a very, very long drive, I thought 2 o'clock, 54 miles, you know, I'll be there in plenty of time to check my email and get some other things done. And Irwin and I were classmates back in the heady days of the 1970s at Harvard Law School. He's been a friend forever, we've done a lot of great things together, and you're very happy to have him as the dean of this law school. And I just want to thank those who've already spoken about Almyroff, I mean just the idea of the great work that he did. Always trying to think of something unique and different and interesting, innovative in the law that might make the life better for those who are suffering is his legacy. And I think that that legacy will continue. This is my second time on the campus. I was here a few years ago to speak at the university before the law school opened, actually. And so it's nice to see the folks here. How many people are actually law students, or okay, got a good number. How many people are under 30? Okay, all right, good, good, good. So what's great about it is that it gives a unique opportunity to talk about some of the things that are important to me. And the dean didn't say all of this, but what sort of makes this an interesting and useful opportunity for me to talk about it is because I had the great, great pleasure in my 27 years of teaching. I'm teaching both Michelle Obama, 1985 to 88 when I started teaching, and then Barack Obama, 1988 to 1991. They never met at Harvard. She graduated in June of 88, and he started in September of 88. And they met at Chicago when she was at a law firm trying to recruit him to the firm, and he was at the law firm as an associate trying to recruit her to be his wife. So I think he ultimately prevailed, right? And they both are doing great stuff. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that in terms of where we are now, and I can't wait to take your questions. There's a lot that I wanted to talk about, and it's interesting having taught them both just to put the context together, and I'm not going to publicly say that Michelle's the smartest. I've never done so that, right? But there are two outstanding people, but what you don't know about them is that Michelle from Chicago, you may know that, her and her brother, both went to Princeton. He got his MBA, she got her JD, and she went to Harvard. And she was a public interest lawyer even then in law school, always well-dressed, always well-spoken, always very successful, and relevant clients. And the Legal Aid Clinic at Harvard represented a lot of people for tenants' rights and benefits and the whole host of civil issues. I mean, that was her commitment to her parents. She would go and not just be a Harvard law student and a graduate, but someone who would service others who needed her service while she was there. And I think she's continued that ironically and in a unique way, in the let's move area. And please still tell her I'm eating chocolate chip cookies during the break that she would just, oh, not again. I told you, those things are not healthy, all right? So you don't see me eating any chocolate chip cookies. I hope you didn't order any. I saw some veggies out there and some fruit. So I'm going for the good stuff just in case you tell it. But the whole idea of using her power as it is to try to influence the way people think about their health themselves. And I just wanted to say a word about her before talking to Barack and the broader topic. What makes Michelle so remarkable is that as the first lady, she's invited young people to the White House, but she's gone into the community. Those who've ever been to Washington DC, you know, it's like two cities. There's a Northwest and Southwest. There's a Northeast and Southeast. There's a largely African-American and largely poor community. And very little happens there in terms of supermarket, in terms of investment. And she went there and talked to young people, young, poor African-American, Latino boys and girls about the idea of being self-righteous. Particularly young women about protecting their bodies, not giving in to the power of those who are trying to be aggressive and how important it is for them to grow. And then she took a lot of other women that were prominent in art and sports and media and law and medicine. So they could see role models and see who they could be, like Michelle and like these other outstanding women of all racist colors and creeds. And then she said, you know, I've come to your house. I want you to come to my house and invite them to the White House. And something very simple. You just think about this of year 8, 9, 10, 11 years old. And she says, you see that? This is your house. You see this lawn? This is your lawn. I want you to trust me. If you're young, I want you to dig it up. And I want you to put some seeds in there. And I want you to come back in a few months and you'll see that you're going to grow some vegetables and some fruits and you're going to make a difference. And she wasn't teaching them just about growing something at the White House, but it was about personal responsibility, about health, about diet, about collective engagement. All those things were part of the social messages. And the only thing that surprised me, I mean the idea of lettuce and tomatoes and carrots and all those are great, but when the kids were planning arugula at the White House, it just didn't quite, that's Barak's thing, right? So I knew he had a little bit of influence on it. But that's who she is. And Dean Timurinsky will appreciate this, that one of the things we love about teaching, we had some great teachers and some terrible teachers. I mean, just be honest about it, right? And they were very interesting and thought-provoking, but they controlled the classroom. We were very engaging, would offer our points of view. And I started a class at Harvard in 1988, I think it was, called the Saturday School Program. Particularly minority students, I would bring them together on Saturday mornings. We started at 8 in the morning and they would drag in. And I started moving to 8.30. They would drag in, we would move it to 9. And then at 10 o'clock it was perfect. My sense, get there early, but they came at 10, and we had a great turnout. And Barak was one of the smartest kids, if not the smartest student at Harvard Law School, who was the first black president of Law Review, very good academically. He would come to the program and he would sit up front. You know, students normally, you know this, you sit in the back, you're back ventures, right? And you don't sit in the front, but he'd sit in the front. And I would be giving a dialogue or discussion about something. And we would have people like that, if you'd never met him, Fred Korematsu. You could read the case, but to talk about a Japanese American, a florist from San Francisco, and what he went through with the internment camps. And the Second World War was a remarkable sense about the person, not just about the case, to give the case some context. And people would talk about the law review articles, they were researching and preparing. And the idea was to get students comfortable with engaging with faculty and dialogue, asking questions, giving answers. And that was part of what we tried to do. And what made it so great is that, you know, Barak would come and he would say, he would answer the question. You know, I think, you know, there is some regression analysis here that's important that you have to take a look at. But if you think about it, what Carol said was right on point, Professor, which is because she sort of put the minutiae together in a way that's very powerful. And Paul, when Paul was addressing you, Paul really understood the concepts of how these things can be conflicts, and that you can't resolve them all. And Jerry, I mean Jerry was, I said, Barak, I'm teaching this class, right? But that's the idea he had. And you've seen that not just as a student in the classroom sharing with others, but as the president of the Harvard Law Review sharing with others, as the president of the United States, trying to bring, as a senator, trying to bring everyone together. And that may be a failed idea. It's a nice aspirational idea that we're one nation, one people all together, but we see the tension now is very different. Now what's interesting in thinking about the election of President Obama is that I went all around the country many times. I supported him when he ran for state Senate in Illinois in the 1990s when he made the foolish mistake to run against the congressman from Chicago for Congress and got slammed. I think Bobby Rush got 67% of the vote. And then Barak came, said, Tree, I'm not going to try the federal Congress anymore. I'm going to run for the Senate. I said, that's great. I think going back to the state Senate, they'll be great. He says, no, I'm running for the U.S. Senate. He said, Barak, you just got crushed running for the U.S. Congress. But I'm doing much better now. I said, OK, 2,000. How much money do you have less than all the other people? Name recognition? None at all. Right? Endorsements? Well, the guy who carries my bags, he likes me. So, but the idea was that he had a message that he would go and think about this, going running for U.S. Senate and having a rally and you and the guy carrying your bags and two other people showed up. And he would have this long hour-long conversation and then after taking questions, why are you guys here? I don't know. We thought you'd give away something free. We just came to see what was happening. But it finally worked for a host of reasons. From 2004, and he gave, as you may remember, the Democratic National Convention Speech in Boston. And I want you to just at some point go back and look at it because it is a classic speech that focuses on the middle. Not African Americans, not Latin Americans, but all Americans, not blue states, not red states. But the United States, the whole idea, the Democrats were applauding him and said, this guy's offering something very different. He's trying to create a world that embraces everybody without regard to politics. And that was his ultimate go when he ran for Senate in 2004. When he ran for White House, it was a little bit different. And for this reason, because he, in a sense, empowered a lot of people to realize that their vote mattered. And that was important. And he says, incredibly, enthusiasm from African Americans, more than ever before, Latinos, Asian Americans, women who were first very supportive of Hillary Clinton and ultimately came to his side. And more whites than John Kerry had in 2004, and that Al Gore had in 2000. So in a sense, there was something magical about what was going on, that a lot of first-time voters were involved in it. And, but you used to think about, it was the rainbow. It wasn't the black vote or the Latino vote or the Hispanic vote or the Native American vote. It was everybody seeing that this guy was different. And it wasn't because of race. And I think it's very important because we've had candidates before. We had Shirley Chisholm in the early 1970s. We had Al Sharpton in 2004. We had Jesse Jackson with galvanized people in 1984 and 1988. And I said I wasn't going to tell that, but I'm going to tell this. When Jackson was running in 88, you know Dukakis won the Democratic nomination and Jackson went to his house for dinner in Brookline in Massachusetts. And I'm going to see the former governor tomorrow. So I hope the paper doesn't report this. But Jesse Jackson goes to his house, has the dinner. Michael Dukakis is a very austere gentleman, very, I'm not going to say cheap. Frugal, is that a better word? Frugal, he's not cheap. He's frugal. He's very careful. You eat light, spend light, modest home, small car, environmentally sound, all of that. And so Jesse Jackson went to his house. And I saw Jesse later that night and he says, tree, I need you to take me to eat. I said, you just ate at the governor's house. He said, man, I'm hungry. I was hungry when I got there, hungry when I left there. I don't know what they were eating, but it wasn't very healthy. It wasn't very good, very filling. So we had to go get him some greens and some potato salad and some corn and mac and cheese and chicken. And he said, no, that's a meal. So I'll just warn you if you're going to go to the caucus house, eat before or after. Right? Don't put that in the paper, please. Please, right? So there have been candidates before. And Jesse Jackson won in Michigan. He did very well in South Carolina. But there still was a sense that he was not the national candidate. And he had labor. He had some women's groups. He certainly had African-Americans and other minorities supporting him. But it wasn't the same kind of sense that Obama had, but he paved the road. Obama wouldn't be in the White House today if Jesse Jackson and others had not run before. He, in a sense, built on the structure that they created. And here's a small thing about it. What Jackson did, you may remember, he lost a lot of states. Even though he had 38 or 40 or 42 percent of votes, it was winner take all. And what he did that helped Obama enormously was to change the law so that the person in second, if he got 42 percent of the votes, that would be important in terms of elegance. And so that had a big impact on Obama's run for democratic nomination and also the ultimate run as well. So here's the question. So he gets elected on November 4, 2008. And it's a wonderful moment for the world. And then you start seeing things like, you remember Bobby Kennedy on the assassination of Dr. King in 1968 says that in 40 years, I suspect that there will be a Negro elected president. 1968 started planting a seed. None of us thought it was possible in 2008. It just did not seem possible until we started seeing the people getting excited about the candidate. And what's interesting about it when you talk about race is that he had as much critical race objection to his candidacy from the Black community as he did from conservatives who were Republicans. In fact, I would say he had more from the Black community because the first thing about Barack that was different from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Shirley Chisholm, they said he wasn't Black enough, right? Because his father was an African from Kenya. His mother was white from Kansas. He's not a commitment to her parents. She would go and not just be a Harvard law student and a graduate, but someone who would service others who needed her service while she was there. And I think she's continued that, ironically, and in a unique way in the let's move area. And please still tell her I'm eating chocolate chip cookies during the break. That she would just, oh, not again. I told you, those things are not healthy. All right, so you don't see me eating any chocolate chip cookies. I hope you didn't order any. I saw some veggies out there and some fruit. So I'm going for the good stuff just in case you tell it. But the whole idea, the fusion her power as it is to try to influence the way people think about their health themselves. And I just wanted to say a word about her before talking to Barack and then the broader topic. What makes Michelle so remarkable is that as the first lady, she's invited young people to the White House, but she's gone into the community. Those who've ever been to Washington, DC, you know, it's like two cities. There's a Northwest and Southwest. There's a Northeast and Southeast. Southeast is a largely African American and largely poor community. And very little happens there in terms of supermarket, in terms of investment. And she went there and talked to young people, young, poor, African American, Latino boys and girls about the idea of being self-righteous, particularly young women, about protecting their bodies, not giving in to the power of those who are trying to be aggressive and how important it is for them to grow. And then she took a lot of other women that were prominent in art and sports and media and law and medicine so they could see role models and see who they could be, like Michelle and like these other outstanding women of all racist colors and creeds. And then she said, you know, I've come to your house. I want you to come to my house and invite them to the White House. And something very simple. You think about this of year 8, 9, 10, 11 years old. She says, you see that? This is your house. You see this lawn? This is your lawn. I want you to trust me. If you're young, I want you to dig it up and I want you to put some seeds in there and I want you to come back in a few months and you'll see you're going to grow some vegetables and some fruits and you're going to make a difference. And she wasn't teaching them just about growing something at the White House but it was about personal responsibility, about health, about diet, about collective engagement. All those things were part of the subtle messages. And the only thing that surprised me, I mean, the idea of lettuce and tomatoes and carrots and all those are great. But when the kids were planning a rugula at the White House, it just didn't quite... That's Barack's thing, right? So I knew he had a little bit of influence on it. But that's who she is. And Dean Timurinsky will appreciate this, that one of the things we love about teaching, we have some great teachers and some terrible teachers. So let me just be honest about it, right? And they were very interesting and thought-provoking but they controlled the classroom. We were very engaging, would offer our points of view. And I started a class at Harvard 1988, I think it was, called the Saturday School Program. Particularly minorities are bringing them together on Saturday mornings. We started at 8 in the morning. And they would drag in, I started moving to 8.30. They would drag in, we would move it to 9. And then at 10 o'clock it was perfect. I, you know, my sense, get there early. But they came at 10 and we had a great turnout. And Barack was one of the smartest kids, if not the smartest, student at Harvard Law School. He was the first black president of the Law Review, very good academically. He would come to the program and he would sit up front. You know, students normally, you know this, you sit in the back. You're back ventures, right? And you don't sit in the front, but he'd sit in the front. And I would be giving a dialogue or a discussion about something. And we would have people like that if you never met him, Fred Kormatsu. You could read the case, but to talk about a Japanese American, a florist from San Francisco, and how, what he went through with the internment caps in the Second World War was a remarkable sense about the person, not just about the case, to give the case some context. And people would talk about the, the Law Review articles. They were researching and preparing. And the idea was to get students comfortable with engaging with faculty and dialogue, asking questions, giving answers. And that was part of what we tried to do. And what made it so great is that, you know, Barack would come and he would say, you know, he would answer the question. You know, I think, you know, there is some regression analysis here that's important that you have to take a look at. But if you think about it, what Carol said was right on point, Professor, because she sort of put the minutiae together in a way that's very powerful. And Paul, when Paul was addressing you, Paul really understood the concepts of how these things can be conflicts and that you can't resolve them all. And Jerry, I mean, Jerry was, I said, Barack, I'm teaching this class, right? But that's the idea he had. And you've seen that not just as a student in the classroom sharing with others, but as the President of the Harvard Law Review sharing with others, as the President of the United States trying to bring, as a senator, trying to bring everyone together. And that may be a failed idea. It's a nice aspirational idea that we're one nation, one people all together, but we see the tension now is very different. Now, what's interesting in thinking about the election of President Obama is that I went all around the country many times. I supported him when he ran for state senate in Illinois in the 1990s when he made the foolish mistake to run against the congressman from Chicago for Congress and got slammed. I think Bobby Rush gets 67% of the vote. And then Barack came and said, Tree, I'm not going to try the federal Congress anymore. I'm going to run for the Senate. I said, that's great. I think going back to the state senate bill, he said, no, I'm running for the U.S. Senate. He said, Barack, you just got crushed running for the U.S. Congress. But I'm doing much better now. I said, OK, 2000, how much money do you have less than all the other people? Name recognition, none at all, right? Endorsements, well, the guy who carries my bags, he likes me. So, but the idea was that he had a message that he would go and think about this, going, running for U.S. Senate and having a rally, and you and the guy carrying your bags and two other people showed up. And he would have this long, hour-long conversation and then after taking questions, why aren't you guys here? I don't know. We thought you were giving away something free. We just came to see what was happening. But it finally worked for a host of reasons from 2004 and he gave, as you may remember, the Democratic National Convention Speech in Boston. And I want you to just, at some point, go back and look at it because it is a classic speech that focuses on the middle. Not African Americans, not Latin Americans, but all Americans, not blue states, not red states, but the United States. The whole idea, the Democrats were applauding, but said, this guy is offering something very different. He's trying to create a world that embraces everybody without regard to politics. And that was his ultimate go when he ran for Senate in 2004. When he ran for White House, it was a little bit different. And for this reason, because he, in a sense, empowered a lot of people to realize that their vote mattered. And that was important. And he says, incredibly, enthusiasm from African Americans, more than ever before, Latinos, Asian Americans, women who were first very supportive of Hillary Clinton and ultimately came to his side, and more whites than John Kerry had in 2004 and that Al Gore had in 2000. So in a sense, there was something magical about what was going on, that a lot of first-time voters were involved in it. And, but you used to think about, it was the rainbow. It wasn't the black vote or the Latino vote or the Hispanic vote or the Native American vote. It was everybody seeing that this guy was different. And it wasn't because of race. And I think it's very important because we've had candidates before. We had Shirley Chisholm in the early 1970s. We had Al Sharpton in 2004. We had Jesse Jackson with galvanized people in 1984 and 1988. And I said I wasn't going to tell that, but I'm going to tell this. When Jackson was running in 1988, you know Dukakis won the Democratic nomination and Jackson went to his house for dinner in Brookline in Massachusetts. And I'm going to see the former governor tomorrow. So I hope the paper doesn't report this. But Jesse Jackson goes to his house, has the dinner. Michael, Dukakis is a very austere gentleman. Very, I'm not going to say cheap. Frugal, is that a better word? Is that a... Frugal. He's not cheap. He's frugal. He's very careful. You eat light, spend light, modest home, small car, environmentally sound, all of that. And so Jesse Jackson went to his house. And I saw Jesse later that night and he says, Tree, I need you to take me to eat. I said, you just ate at the governor's house. He said, man, I'm hungry. I was hungry when I got there, hungry when I left there. I don't know what they were eating, but it wasn't very healthy. It wasn't very good, very filling. So we had to go get them some greens and some potato salad and some corn and mac and cheese and chicken. And he said, now, that's a meal. So I just warn you, if you're going to go to the caucus house, eat before or after, right? Don't put that in the paper, please. Please, right? So there have been candidates before. And Jesse Jackson won Michigan. He did very well in South Carolina. But there still was a sense that he was not the national candidate. And he had labor. He had some women's groups. He certainly had African-Americans and other minorities supporting him. But it wasn't the same kind of sense that Obama had, but he paved the road. Obama wouldn't be in the White House today if Jesse Jackson and others had not run before. He, in a sense, built on the structure that they created. And here's a small thing about it. What Jackson did, you may remember, he lost a lot of states. Even though he had 38 or 40 or 42 percent of votes, it was winner-take-all. And what he did that helped Obama enormously was to change the law so that the person in second, if he got 42 percent of the votes, that would be important in terms of elegance. And so that had a big impact on Obama's run for Democratic nomination and also the ultimate run as well. So here's the question. So he gets elected on November 4, 2008. And it's a wonderful moment for the world. And then you start seeing things like, you remember Bobby Kennedy on the assassination of Dr. King in 1968? He says that in 40 years, I suspect that there will be a Negro elected president, 1968, started planting a seed. None of us thought it was possible in 2008. He just did not seem possible until we started seeing the people getting excited about the candidate. And what's interesting about it when you talk about race is that he had as much critical race objection to his candidacy from the black community as he did from conservatives who were Republicans. In fact, I would say he had more from the black community because the first thing about Barack that was different from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Shirley Chisholm, they said he wasn't black enough, right? Because his father was an African from Kenya. His mother was white from Kansas. He's not really even from an area of Africa that was part of the slave trade, right? But families from Kenya, not from Ghana or some of the other Senegal, some of the other areas where you could see the action. So he had to overcome that. And I can tell you how, talking about post-racial, when we were campaigning in South Carolina in 2007, it was pretty clear that if you put people on a hierarchy of how they would succeed, the Clintons would be first. Why? Because Hillary and Bill Clinton were from the South, growing up and served in Arkansas. And John Edwards, remember, his father was from South Carolina and Edwards was a viable candidate and the black politicians and clergy said, we don't know this kid from Illinois. There's nothing about him that makes him appear to us to be a candidate that we should support. And so the idea was that he was the least known. And the strategy was in 2006, not to run in 50 states, he could never beat Hillary Clinton, name recognition, notoriety, familiarity in 50 states. And the idea was to go back and forth, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. Because he knew that if you didn't win one or two of those, you can't be a national candidate. You have to win one or two of those and then have strength state by state by state, which was part of the campaign. But you always saw a very mixed issue. Now that race matter, it did. Remember Michelle Obama's one comment? Is this the first time that I really feel proud to be an American? It backfired and she disappeared from the campaign because she could not be an asset. And then you had understandable Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton being able to go around the country and roll up and energize Democrats. You only had Barack Obama, who could only be one person in one place at one time. He didn't have the family going out the way that we might have imagined early on. But the race issue was interesting. But what changed is that by the time we got to South Carolina, people were interested. Why? Because they had met a woman by the name of Michelle Robinson Obama. Where did she go? She went to beauty parlors. What did she say? Girl, my feet hurt. Can I take my shoes off? Right? Yeah, no, no, don't burn my scalp. I mean, all the things that you think about at a beauty parlor, they saw his wife as a real person. And they assumed, right, not having read paper, not watching news. He's from Harvard, Hawaii. President Lawryview, he must be married to someone other than someone within his race. And when they saw Michelle Robinson, it changed dramatically. All of a sudden, they supported her. Is she on the ballot? Well, she's not on the ballot. But if you vote for him, you're voting for her. But isn't she? She's not running. But if you vote for him, but she's not going to be the president or vice president. She's not going to be the co-president. But if you vote for him, OK. So you can see how race played an interesting way, even in states that are almost phenomenally black. And yet the black vote had to be earned, not given away simply because the candidate was an African American. And then it becomes very interesting after we get through the primaries and the national election. I don't know how many of you remember, but the very first major debate between then Senator Obama and Senator McCain was where? In Ole Miss in Mississippi, right? And it was actually a very good debate for Barack because he was smart about the way he handled the debate. If you go back and listen, you'll hear him say to John McCain several times, John or Senator McCain, you're right, but and then explain away. Now, and my progressive friends, my email was burning up. Why didn't he attack him? He had him on the ropes. Why didn't he knock him out? He was smart because who was watching that debate? Not us, not you. Seniors were watching it. And they wanted to know how was this young kid who's what first term Senator going to treat this respected veteran prisoner of war, very legitimate, moderate Republican. How's he going to treat him in terms of the age difference? And the polls that we saw there after were quite amazing because people didn't see Barack as a black person attacking a white person. They saw him as a sensible, thoughtful, deferential candidate and that made an enormous amount of different race sort of went out the window in a way that he was no longer the black candidate. He was a Democratic candidate who respected people who were his elders. And those small things make an enormous amount of difference in his ability to run. Now what's interesting and Erwin knows this as a litigator and having argued cases before the state and federal and Supreme Court as well is that right after he was elected that's when the issue of post-racial America began to emerge. And the idea was that we have now elected a black president so and there are briefs. We don't need the Voting Rights Act anymore, right? We don't need Section 2 or Section 5 of the Civil Rights Act. We don't need this or that because if we can vote for a black person how can we say that we're a discriminatory nation? And in fact, even sometimes in a facetious way, members of the court say, well haven't we solved that problem? Aren't we post-racial now? And that becomes the problem to think that one transformative event can change the way we think about and address the issues of race. It can't. And it should not. Because the problem they become is that if Barack Obama fails, right, then it would be very easy to say well we tried it with one of them and it didn't work. Black, woman, other minority, gay, lesbian, any, think about how that becomes you become the symbol for every member of that group that might be a significant part of it. And at the same time there was an expectation as president that if you're the president, you're the black president. So what are you doing for black people? Because we voted for you, 90%, 95%, 97%. So what are we getting in exchange for? A very legitimate question. But it's an odd question that anyone ever asked Bill Clinton. You're the white president. We're white. What are you doing for us, right? Or Bush or Carter or Reagan, right, or Johnson or Kennedy. And so it becomes very problematic that he had to take on the sense that he was not just the president but he had the president that some people thought he had a responsibility particularly for the African American community. And I think it's a good debate. He certainly has a responsibility for the poor. And one of the campaigns I'm on now personally, this is not Obama, this is not administration, but my sense is that I've been talking all this year and it'll go all the way up through August 28th, 2013. And you know what that is. Not, yes, you do know what it is. That's the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's March on Washington, August 28th, 1963. And the theme I'm carrying with some other scholars and experts around the country is that King had the dream. Now we must have the plan because what I say to you, which is part of this issue is that even though we have a black president, the reality is that particularly in the black community, divide between the poor and the wealthy is greater than ever before. And if you think about what King tried to do in the 1950s and 60s, it was to take the working class and lift them up. It helped a lot of us. That's what Thurgood Marshall tried in the 1950s at Brown, was take the poor children, put them in schools where they could learn and have the same books and same teachers and same enthusiasm. And what happened, those of us in the middle class, and a lot of us were in the middle class, we first, for the first time, had a choice. We could stay in the poor black school that didn't have the resources or the books or the teachers, or we can go across town and they could not keep us out of a public institution. Now, they tried. They closed schools in Virginia. They closed the pool in Mississippi. They closed things that were public to make sure that it wasn't integrated. But we moved to the suburbs. We moved to the private schools. We moved to a community that had fresh food and fresh vegetables in a good market. We moved to places where they had less crime, where there is paved streets, where there are manicute laws. That was part of the choice of what to do in a post-racial society, a post-discriminatory society, and that was the plan in terms of where people wanted to go. And my sense is that now, those of us who are the gifted, and I want to talk about this more, that we have to think about what are we going to do because someone opened the doors for us. And I have never given a talk anywhere in the last two decades without saying what I'm going to say now is that I would never have been at Stanford University and graduated with honors and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. I've never been at Harvard Law School and graduated and also a tenured faculty member with the chair if there had not been for people who'd gone to HBCUs. They made it possible. And I think most directly about the great case of Thurgood Marshall. Thurgood Marshall was taught by a Harvard Law School graduate by the name of Charles Hamilton Houston, whose institute I created at Harvard in 2005. Houston was from Washington, D.C. He went to Amherst College and then he went to Harvard Law School in 1919 after World War I. First African American to be elected to the Law Review based on his grades. And then he couldn't, he didn't go to Wall Street. He didn't go to a major firm. He came back to Howard to teach the next generation of lawyers. And he called them quite interestingly and he had a phrase saying, a lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite. So you have to choose how you're going to use your talents and your gifts to serve your community. You can be selfish and destroy the community or you can be selfless and build a community that's going to be great. So teaching, we don't do that anymore. We teach people how to think, not what to think, but he was teaching them what to think because there was a desperate and critical challenge facing the Black community in the 1930s and 40s. He died in 1950 before the Brown decision but he trained Thurgood Marshall and Oliver Hill and he had Constable Kamali who went to Columbia and became a great lawyer. The roles among the Thorns, the NAACP, and Judge Robert Carter who just passed away and Jack Greenberg and a group of talented people from Howard Law School as well as Bill Coleman and others as well. So what did they do and how did they try to deal with the issues of the 50s and 60s? Well, the first thing that Marshall and Hamilton Houston did is that they went to Maryland because Marshall was from Baltimore, born and raised in Baltimore. He went to an HBCU in Pennsylvania by the name of Lincoln University. He then had his sights set. I'm going to go to the University of Maryland Law School, my home public law school and become a great litigator. They wouldn't accept him because he was Black. So he went to Howard and he became number one in his class and he tried cases actually as a law student with Charles Hamilton Houston in places like Virginia and then they went to Sue to University of Maryland in the 1930s and they found a client and they said that this is a discrimination despite the Plessy versus Ferguson. It still is not equal and we want a Black admitted to the University of Maryland Law School and they won. Here's this Harvard trained lawyer teaching this Howard trained lawyer how to be an exceptional litigator and they won the case in Maryland emitting the first Black student in the history of Maryland Law School. And I have no idea what Thurgood Marshall said when he won the case but I'm sure he said something like this how you like me now, right? I mean I'm making the point that you may call me a Black lawyer you may call me this but I'm going to be much better prepared and make an enormous amount of difference when I do that. And so Obama has to reckon with that there is the legacy of Dr. King and what he had to do to move people on the streets the legacy of what Marshall had to do to move people in the courtroom and then to open up the doors the people can vote get rid of the restrictions on voting all that is what benefited Barack Obama when he ran and so a lot of people think we might be post-racial and I don't even like the term post-racial I think that gives you one contact but the term is post-racism right? When do we post-racism so the person's color and ethnicity doesn't influence our judgment about their ability until they have the chance to prove it and when Dr. King sat in 1963 was he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character not the color of their skin we still haven't achieved that so we still have to make sure that we take his dream the aspirational part of the speech and make it happen and here's why we're not quite post-racial and let me just back up if I were to ask you the question a good law student are we post-racial America what's the best answer you could give to a law professor? Yes? It's simple the best answer the Barack answers well it depends right haven't you heard that a thousand times and when you think you've got it all figured out it depends maybe yes maybe no it depends and I think it does depend but there's some concrete aspects that suggest that we're not there yet and one of them was brought to my attention when we had a discussion about Obama 2009 you know where are we going to take society forward and a good friend of mine Reverend Eugene Rivers reminded us he's very important to have a black president there's a lot he can do but we have to remember we have one black man in the White House but today we have more than a million black men in prison we're not post-racial yet we haven't reached that point in our history where everyone can be judged equally without regard to race or gender or sexual orientation or class or age or any of those different factors that might make a difference but we can I'm not saying that we can't do it we just haven't done it yet and I want to see us do it in the meantime and the final thing I want to say is this thinking about Barack Obama I remember we had this great conversation in 1991 when he decided that he was going to graduate from the Harvard Law School and we had this conversation he says tree as he called me I have a bit of a dilemma it's 1991 and in my three years here I've done well and so much so that I was elected the president of the Harvard Law Review and so I've earned the right as the president of the Harvard Law Review to serve as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice yeah yeah and he says also I've done academically well I've got a lot of good grades some of the best grades of my peers and I could go to Chicago or New York or Washington I could work for a law firm and I could easily make $100,000 a year because I've earned the right to do that yeah that makes sense but I want to tell you that when I came to Harvard in 1988 I made a promise to the people of Chicago that once I got my law degree from Harvard I would go back to Chicago and become a community organizer and I just want to ask you very candidly can I can I go back to Chicago and keep my promise to the people there as opposed to being a clerk for the Supreme Court or working for a law firm and I looked at him for a while and said Barak yes you can right you know don't clap Barak hasn't given me credit once for any of that right but but there's a trail there that wasn't said the first time right as much as you might in a sense associated with Barak Obama the idea of being pulse ratio is that for me it came when I was a kid 40 years ago more than 40 years ago working in the fields here in California grew up in Merced, California and I met a very strong Latino man and Latina his name was Cesar Chavez her name was Dolores Huerta and even the workers that were dying because of pesticides who had incredibly poor wages they had this slogan in Spanish that I remember as a child as a young teenager si se puede it's exactly the same thing and so these things transform us from generations and they transcend generations that they in their way without a place to live without a decent salary with all sorts of health concerns without a guarantee of being able to work and yet they had this si se puede the whole idea is that no matter what the barriers might be we are going to work as hard as we can and live as much as we can and hopefully our children will have a better life and that's what they thought for and I say that to think about what we have to do now in the 21st century I'm so glad that he is in the White House and what that transformative power may be and I remember in October 2008 I was doing some campaigning for the president then senator in Florida different part of Florida and my son oldest son who just turned 36 yesterday on Valentine's Day has three daughters and the oldest in 2008 was seven the middle daughter was four and the baby has just been more born in January 2008 and they called me about 11 o'clock on my cell phone the oldest Markel and she said Papa Papa guess what I said what Markel she said we voted I said oh I said who did you vote for trying to see what she's on so she said Obama of course we voted for Obama right and what was significant is that in 2008 I can see some progress through little girls who have no sense about race or class or gender they have no sense but they were seeing this and their parents had the foresight to let them know how important voting was not just take them to the polls and watch them vote but say you marked the ballot for them right and so that you know legally right but but they did it but the whole idea these girls are taking their little markers and marking the ballots and who they wanted to vote for president and for them it was an important in a sense vindication for me of voting rights so they thought it was something important to do that the parents were taken off of Sunday in Florida in 2008 you could vote 18 days before the actual election and several days during the week and the churches would go in a group after church services on Sunday morning and go go to a polling place and vote on Sunday afternoon that's now in part of the 35 states that have restricted the rights of voting for 2012 but they did that in a very impressive way and it told me how much it is that that they're they're growing up not in a race list generation but in a different context of race where it's not a lever on their neck that's holding them back it's not something that they're afraid of they're almost unaware of it now how many of you had had to deal with flat Stanley anyone had to deal with flat Stanley I just got one from our granddaughter parents will know about this flat Stanley your child at some point will bring home a flat Stanley that you were supposed to take around the country and around the world and I've taken my flat Stanley to Celtics games to Harvard games to Boston Commons all sorts of plays and I I took a picture of him with a beautiful painting that looks like Fenway Park my wife's at Charles you have to take him to Fenway Park you can't take him well who's going to know they're only fifth graders Charles somebody will know right so but the whole idea was interesting because I don't know why but they give the children a blank color flat Stanley and they get to color the pants the socks the shoes the tie and it was interesting that on the other hand both of them use the brown crayon to cover the face right not black but brown right and since that they were trying to think of what's the natural color of Stanley right and so in a sense that they were they weren't as the children in the brown in the brown dolls looking at race in a way that it was negative and I don't want to be that but there since it was sort of a subtlety that you know this I'm giving this face some color green pants blue socks red shoes I don't I didn't get that right but but it's very interesting that the face was and it had some color to it from their point of view as a I don't want people to be colorblind I want them to be color conscious and there's a difference between two I don't think we'll ever be colorblind and the way I know it makes the difference is that Markel who is now 10 she called me the next year and said Papa I guess what I said what Markel she says I'm so happy with President Obama I'm a vote for him again next year now I can tell that he wasn't running 2010 right but I mean the whole idea of the enthusiasm to doing something made all the difference in the world what she's going to do so this three ways one the idea of talking about a post-racial America or post-racial America it's not rocket science it's harder than that it's harder than that because it makes us get into a zone of discomfort and talking to people who are different than us and trying to understand difference and trying to understand how we can be a greater community it has to go away from the slavery from the resistance the acquiescence to all that do embracing you have to go from the resistance to embracing to get there to make sure it makes a difference it also means having these conversations in a way to see the benefits of diversity it's not a single shot and you're not completely diverse if you have a drop of pepper in a sea of salt so be very careful about what you think is diversity it may not work if you don't really embrace it as a comprehensive way and you have to be careful that you don't become in a sense just like the folks from the past generation I'm teaching a class at Harvard Law School now I'm sure our professor turned into graves Irwin but it's called Revitalizing American Cities I'm talking about the plight of America cities today in terms of the issues of public safety housing employment and education and I have eight cities that I'm looking at Atlanta Baltimore Detroit St. Louis New Orleans Newark Oakland and Washington DC so eight different cities that all have some sorts of problems right and so the problem was that I showed a little clip you might have seen it from Henry Gates the color line in America from 2004 and it showed this group of prominent African Americans and a place called Cascade I don't know if anybody's from Atlanta but it's a very prominent African American part of the community big lawns big houses et cetera very successful and these are the post civil rights groups who said we've earned the right we have our own neighborhoods but they're all black Prince George's County very similar almost all black and the idea prominent a lot of things are going going well there et cetera but at least I raised the question theoretically because I don't have the answer but as an integrationist I'm a little concerned about is that the answer that now we have a choice the choice is that I don't want to be the speck of salt and a sea of speck of pepper and a sea of salt I want to be in a community of people who respect me and this one one woman African American very successful Lori said I got kids know each other we have Starbucks we have Einstein's bagels we have tennis courts I mean we that she's saying we have just what they had and I'm not sure whether that's a full answer or an incomplete answer to the problem of how do we all become a race of equals of equals and so my third point I fear that the success may be that we can all be in our own little in a sense silo and not see that the benefit of all of us coming together in some meaningful way which I hope will happen and my students are you know pushing back as they should saying well you know they were there's a lot of hostility when they're only black in the neighborhood or only Latino in the neighborhood or only gay person only lesbian only you know sexuality may be an issue in a community in terms of religious community all of these things might come up and so we don't want to go through that we're much comfortable being in million-dollar homes with other million-dollar people who look like us who act like us and who aren't going to challenge us and I don't want that to be the ultimate result I want to see what Barack Obama said in 2004 not red states not blue states but the United States and I may be wrong I'm a died-to-war Democrat there's no question about that I don't think I'll ever be anything other than unless I'm an independent I've been called a socialist and everything else but I'm a Democrat right but the the point I wanted to make is that the third point is that how can we really instinctively think about seeing the world as one as opposed to of many a very diverse talent and I think that may be the place and I say that for this reason that I'll end here what troubles me is that very still Trump's class in so many different ways I just remember being in New York and the two things that you don't want to ever experience it's not everybody has problems but there's nothing worse for a black man in New York than one in a cab and it raining right because you're not going to get a cab right and the thing about it the drivers who I'm trying to get to pick me up most of them are immigrants but what have we taught them already about me I'm wearing my thousand dollar suit I'm wearing my you know brand new tie great shoes I even have my Colin Powell book up there my American journey look look well I know right but they just zoom on by and then it's sort of it sort of upsets me that a white woman or man will see them struggling and they will hell a cab and let me get in it that's not an answer I mean that's a temporary solution I'm very grateful to get a cab but it tells me that they would stop for her or him on the spot right and he or she will make sure that I get in the cab and that tells me that we've got to deal with that as a as a society and maybe say obituary don't drive don't ride in cabs but that's that's not an answer how do we create in the minds of people who've been here for less time than we have that we are society treat all people equal so the answer to the question are we post-racial it's not yes or no it depends and it depends on what we intend to do from this day going forward and trying to address these issues in a meaningful way and I'll stop there and take some questions thank you very much any questions yes sir I think it's a lot of both I think it's more politics than race but they in some sense are intertwined because they will say things to him that they can't state they wouldn't say to anybody else I can't recall I'm sure there have been I can't recall a president in our lifetime who's ever been interrupted giving a speech about healthcare right I mean you lie I mean and so you've got to think about that how that works and let me give you another example politics and that's that's what the book's about I wrote the book The Presumption of Guilt now students tell me and law professors tell me there's no such thing in law as the presumption of guilty the presumption of innocence that I wrote this book last year about the gates the rest of the year before wrote 2010-2009 because it illustrated to me how politics and race play right because two things happen gates is a prominent african-american professor a university professor which is the but I don't mean employing a university but a specialized not just a tenure not just cheer but a university that's the top of the mark of university MacArthur genius award written a dozen books a hundred honorary degrees a dozen PBS specials so an accomplished man from West Virginia the police officers Jim Crowley white police officer working class hard working guys admired by blacks who know him didn't know gates and you saw the dynamics of what happened in July 2009 how many of you heard something about gates the rest of 2009 but the book talks about that and unpeels the onion adds a lot of facts let me just give you a little sense of that Gates is just getting back from China and he goes to his house he can't open his door in the middle of the day it's 12 o'clock and his driver tries to help him open they both try to push it open they finally get it open the driver takes two two pieces of luggage inside the house drives off gets a tip Gates calls his real estate said my door's jammed had a break I don't want to sleep in this house tonight please have someone can fix it and he's talking to her about going to China talking to Yo-Yo Ma visiting his ancestors seeing some 13th century documents and he sees a shadow on his porch and he says wow you got to repair a guy here already she says no for us Gates it'll take 10 more minutes he goes to his door and it's Sergeant Crowley he's gotten a call saying that it looks like somebody broke into the house and what's interesting is that when you talk about politics of race and race the woman who called in my view most people criticized back in 2009 had not heard the 9-11 tapes what did she say? she says a woman tells me it looks like they're pushing the door they're inside the house there are two people who are going in and she says this on 9-11 tape 9-11 tape I don't know if they work there or live there no presumption at all I'm just reporting what I see you investigate but I'm not saying they're probably burglarized I don't know if they work there or live there the officer says are they black or Hispanic? she says excuse me are they black, white or Hispanic? she says well once Hispanic but I didn't get a chance to see the other now the police officer writes in this report that the woman said that she saw two black men with backpacks on the porch that's a profile that's a term that's commonly used because his house in Cambridge is two blocks away from high school it wouldn't be a surprise to see two black men who were teenagers with backpacks going into a house but that's that's what's in the officer's mind so he and Gates get into it and he tells Gates I want you to come outside and Gates says no I live here call the police chief chief of police you don't believe he said no won't you come outside he says I'm not done come outside I live here and also to show me some ideas so Gates shows him two ideas now this is an interesting class as you have any idea which ID he might have showed the officer first guess Harvard University right right had his picture name university professor Harvard University and so the class do you know who I am and that's the then he showed him his driver's license photograph name address Cambridge all of that right and then the officer's looking at these things like you know I don't know who this why I didn't come outside the officer's just looking and this is the first thing Gates says do you know who I am that's the first thing he says think about the officer the second is that do you know who you're messing with he said that officer just keeps looking at his ID are you doing this because I'm a black man and you're a white police officer you can imagine the officer's blood creeping up right poor thing this is what happens to a black man in America right so you can imagine this Gates is enraged since this has happened in his house the officer's saying I'm just investigating the crime and this guy's going crazy and you can see how they're having that difference and then Gates says the ultimate I'm going to file a complaint against you I want your name and your badge number I heard that oh right I've been teaching 27 years at Harvard criminal law the first thing I tell my students never ever ever tell a police officer you're going to file a complaint and never ask him or her for her name or her badge why it's right there look at it memorize it right and use it later right but Gates didn't take my class right and so what happens is you see this is an issue and then the officer last thing the officer says as it says he says Gates continued to yell at me which is true now everything Gates did was protected by the first amendment now I wouldn't do it but it was protected what did it happen in his house not in an apartment house not outside in the streets no one heard it but that officer and that citizen right but you can see the dynamics begin to crystallize in the big way and the way that that happened and then the officer the last thing the officer says Gates continues to yell at me that's true and he says I put in his report I told I told the person if he wanted to continue to talk to him I would speak to him about the matter outside of the residents he put that in his report after he rested him now why do you think he wants to speak to him outside of the residents anybody have any idea well I guess because then he's not protected that's exactly right right outside the residents he's in public and if he's making those statements it's a public disturbance and that's what he used in a sense and he said I'm leaving and Gates hobbled out behind him right outside well I'm not through with you yet as soon as he got outside he got arrested right and charges were just missed in a couple of days what happened the president got involved and remember what he said Gates is my friend the first thing I don't know all the facts and what should you do then shut up let's edit that right and then he says the Cambridge police acted stupidly no the Cambridge police acted stupidly when you arrest the man in his own house after he's shown your identification but what did we hear first five words the Cambridge police acted stupidly that's what people remember then the last thing he said is that there's a history of the racial profile of blacks and Latinos I supported legislation as a state senator in Illinois to end racial profiling and so those comments I send the book blackened him now what do I mean by that that though there are people who saw him as the black president when he took the friend of the black professor against the hard working class white for his office so race Trump class Obama was criticized Gates was criticized and Crowley was a police officer doing his job it blackened him in another way that the black and Latino people around the country applauded the fact that he talked about racial profiling and it's a problem in America and so I was getting all these letters and responses from that so and that's how race Trump's class and how do we get beyond that as part of the problem so I think it's in the other context you talk about race and policies let me give you three other examples I'll talk about in the book remember Joe Biden said that Barack Obama is clean and articulate right you remember Harry Reid saying two things he's light complexion and he doesn't use the Negro dialogue dialect unless he has to right these are Democrats and remember Chris Matthews saying that was a fantastic state of the union address I forgot that he was black what does that mean and so those are not racist things these are well-intentioned people trying to be supportive but saying things that has a racial undercurrent that creates another problem I don't know what a Negro dialect is right and maybe I do speak it at some sometimes I know there are different dialects when people talk to different audiences I talk differently from my homies at home than I do in the classroom right and so but that's that's how it becomes all mixed up in terms of what happens but it's hard to say it's race because some of the strongest criticisms of Barack Obama now are coming from African-Americans who are not happy with what he has done or failed to do in their view in terms of focusing on a particular community and so that becomes part of the problem will it play in the next election I think it will because some candidates have already said I'm writing a book that won't come out until after the election don't be looking for it because you won't find it before November 6 2012 but about Obama and race when Newt Gingrich caused him the food stamp president that could be a basic policy political issue in the minds of some it also can be a racially loaded identification in the minds of others so Gingrich would say a thousand times and be correct in his own mind I never meant race I'm talking about giving to more more giving really making people earn their own rights right things like that and the same thing you can find from each of the candidates saying something that may have something to do with politics but some people will view in the context of race let me give you one final example and I'll take the next question do you remember Jan Brewer about three weeks ago when the president was in Arizona and you could just see her pointing her finger and arguing at him and him him smiling and there's a lot of press about that now he was smiling he was saying he was saying Jen I don't like the hell what you said in your book I know it's I'm not that kind of guy you know you talk about me you know it was it was very direct but you saw her as the aggressive one and the next day you get a story about the Latino community hating Jan Brewer all of a sudden are embracing Obama as a solution you know she's got she has an anti-immigration policy he seems more pro-integration so it's interesting that there's a racial connection there the Latinos have seen Barack Obama as the president but also someone who's going to help them succeed in a big issue where Jan Brewer is not going to sit so it's a complicated issue you never you're never going to see the president ever say that someone's attacking him because of race he's just not going to go down that line and you'll have to be the judge of it and I think that a lot of these things are going to be protected in terms of of politics and going to be acceptable because we we'll say anything about anybody to get a vote and it just might work yes ma'am one more question oh is this the last one? you go alright it's I'll take all of them and I'll answer over one okay one is about the affirmative action a student in California now to ship to so that I'd like to know what you think what that does the other is a private question which I've always I've never dared to ask of a black person I was very proud that Obama was half white as well as half black and I don't understand why it is when that's the case that one is immediately called black I mean it's as if I suppose you took paints and mixed them and then of course you know white and black is going to make a brown but to me he's wonderful actually because he's both he had a wonderful brave white mother you know at any rate I don't know if this is a question that bears thinking about particularly when we're talking about race but it over he's stuck it just bothered me it's interesting um in the book I talk about his mother from that same point let me get your question too so or in church it's predominantly black I personally fully support Barack Obama yet I think Barack Obama perhaps could have managed the Jeremiah right what we call it the debacle but certainly but the thought of Jeremiah right as a well-respected liberation theologian and pastor of a major church that Barack Obama finds himself worshiping the assault that Jeremiah right experienced as a result of Fox television and I'd like to hear your reflection on that and clearly we know that to have a smiley corner and all the others have a right to certainly do what they must do but in looking at the black church which historically offered proof to power and liberation for those who did not have a voice in particular how do we manage that particularly from that particular point okay and is there one other question somebody yes well I want to say that I've taken Blacks family around too okay she purposely chose one in her her main reason was and she told us that she was just tired of white people she wanted to see black folks in positions of power in front of the class and all of that but I do notice that a lot of her peers and I think she's included in this group really don't have a sense of history and they really kind of have separated themselves from how they are even able to be where they are and they look at that idea of self-segregation as we were talking about Atlanta as kind of the pinnacle like that's moving on up stage they want to get to and I'm wondering you know do you see that with your students or do you see it as as just a way of thought with young folks they are not necessarily as connected to their past as they could be or should be I'm going to take these questions and reverse-order and answer all three of them in a collective way and the HBCU question what I think is great about it first of all we wouldn't be where we are if HBCU hasn't opened up the doors that's number one that becomes important the other thing at an HBCU you can't make the excuse that races why you're not succeeding right and you can't use that excuse the problem and you and I both see it is that the it's weird as much as they were from the 50s and the 60s and 60s and 70s because your daughter like my daughter and my son were probably raised in the middle class unlike my mother and my father and my grandmother and grandfather right so they knew they'd have a place to sleep they knew we might even take a vacation we had a car we had food on the table and so so they had the conference of life and never experienced it and even if you watch a civil rights video that doesn't do the same thing so it's harder but they are growing up into a society where the success seems like it's that I want to be like them in my own community as opposed to I want to be wherever I can be and be successful and and there there is still this sense of racial antagonism that a lot of African-Americans feel an integrated community when I say integrated it's the speck of pepper and the salt or two specks of pepper and the salt and we have to figure out a way to solve that it's not going to happen easily but it's not happening at HBCU because some are going to criticize it but there really isn't the sense that let me tell you what the 1930s were like let me tell you what the school looked like let me tell you what our funding looked like but let me tell you who were the first doctors and first lawyers and first entrepreneurs and first ministers and let me tell you that 75 years ago can you believe or 100 years ago that the only jobs were what preachers and teachers right you couldn't get a job as a lawyer easily or as a doctor or an entrepreneur because you didn't have a clientele you could everyone was suffering from segregation and they just can't understand that we talk about there as a fountain and that you couldn't vote and you had to pay a poll tax it just seems unimaginable and the difference between your daughter and my children who are grown now and my grandchildren is that in their lifetime in their early lifetime a black man I'll come back to this has been elected president they see him as black and so they think that we've solved all our problems right and so that's why that's gonna I'm gonna get to your question but that's part of why it is a part of the problem let me say a word about Reverend Jeremiah Wright who I respect dearly and I think is an incredibly gifted black theologian and what's interesting what surprised me the most in 2008 is that no one watched the whole survey that's it you're right you got the clip and you said he was talking about poverty and talking about the fact that folks are suffering and no one's giving them the need it was a remarkable sermon but if you get just 35 seconds of it it seems like it is incendiary right it blew it up and and the president had to make the choice which comes back to your government am I the black president or the president of everybody and it wasn't it wasn't Jeremiah's statements because the president remember after Jeremiah Wright made those statements president then gave his race address in Philadelphia as I can no longer disown Jeremiah Wright than I can disown the black church he said that I can no longer disown the black church I can no disown my black on my white grandmother he was very clear about that and then Jeremiah Wright went to Detroit and then he went to the National Press Club he even did the fraternity salute salute only two people understood what he was doing right but some got that right fraternity by the way he was always what I see right right right but you know I respect him for this reason because he could be a thorn right now because he every everywhere he preaches is the house's path but he's chosen to say I'm not going to let America turn me against Barack Obama even if I disagree with him because he still says I'm his mentor he learned about the Lord through me and so that becomes an important issue on the race issue you ask a terrific question let me get to the second part first you know he's half black and he's half white it's interesting if you if you haven't read it I would just read it I would urge you to read it dreams from my father which I carry around with me it talks about all that in here it talks about Jeremiah Wright and how much he meant to me and I keep trying to correct him Jeremiah Wright's speech sermon that Sunday was not the audacity of hope it was the audacity to hope which makes a difference it's a fundamental difference you're going to see something in a way different than it really is that's the audacity to hope that a different world and Barack Obama changed it around and we'll at some point find out but there was a sense that it was so moving that's what drew him in but on the race issue in this book he gives nothing but absolute credit to his white mother he saw his father once once in his life right and so the father was absent and the thing about it it was his mother who made him think he was black right when he was in school in Hawaii he was Barry because his father had used the name Barry because he says I'm a foreigner people won't understand Barack they'll think as religious and all of that so I'm going to be Barry Obama but his legal name was Barack Hussein Obama senior but he used Barry when he was doing business because people would say oh Barry Gary you know Charles James you know there was a sense of identity and so Barack was listed in this certificate at Pudinhoe High School as Barack but everyone called him Barry and then but what he says is that they were they were turning me into a white person that is they didn't seem to understand that I was biracial they saw me as like everybody else I was different for everybody else I had a different color I had a different bringing up and people treated me different he says I was profiled as a kid and his but it's his mother who taught him everything about race she's the one who taught him about Harry Belafonte about the the great singers about the the great historians about the king he says it here sort of like chest highs in there saying every time my mother had a moment she was talking to me about this black thing and that black thing so she was in sense trying to prepare him in the sense for being who he was now he may have been Barry from the point of view from the Hawaiian friends who he played basketball with and hung out with but his mother was saying you are a Barack what she was saying you are your father son so and it was interesting in a 2010 census you know he he could have gone a different way because if he had checked the box multiracial biracial a large a large number of us would check that now biracial he checked the box African American and condemned by people were biracial saying hey he's our leader he's a biracial guy he's not a black guy and that became part of it as well but he's getting the pushback on the black side from both sides from both the blacks who says he's not black enough and from the whites who says he's not really black he's really from a different part of Africa and he's really more an African than he is an African American that's an artificial there's no America part of him except that he happened to be born in Hawaii I know some of you still think he was born in Kenya but he was really born in Hawaii I think we've proven that and I think we're out of time we need to do two last things one is Professor Ogletree's graciously agreed to sell and sign some of his books they'll be right inside the foyer of the Dean's suite across the hall and we also have a reception that I hope you'll join us in please join me in thanking Professor Ogletree thank you